Hornswoggling Hobgoblins

Senghor

Isolated on the southern end of the Bay of Senghor, the Caldaru people of the bay’s namesake city of Senghor are distinct from their fellow Mwangi natives, both racially and linguistically. Relatively tall, with straight dark hair, green eyes, and skin tones ranging from olive to dark tan, they don’t appear physically similar to any of the other Mwangi ethnicities. What’s more, their Polyglot dialect includes words and phrases that lack parallels in the dialects of their neighbours, and as a result most scholars and some of their neighbouring cultures don’t consider them Mwangi at all, with the distant city-state of Mzali viewing them as just another group of foreigners, as alien as the Sargavans.

Alongside its people, Senghor’s architecture presents a fascinating historical mystery to visitors who marvel at the size and complexity of the port’s series of nested and fortified seawalls and breakwaters. Capable of sheltering the harbour from even such storms as the Eye of Abendego far to the north, and constructed to defend against naval threats that no longer exist for any nation in the modern Expanse, the city appears out of place. The massive stone blocks that make up the oldest portions of the port outstrip anything else within the modern city, or anywhere else on the Mwangi Expanse’s coastline. Combined with the unique Caldaru bloodline, explorers have long theorized that Senghor was constructed in antiquity as a distant outpost of a large, powerful, and sophisticated seafaring empire from either across the Fever Sea or farther south on the Garundi continent beyond the range of local maps. For whatever reason, Senghor lost contact with that empire, be it parent culture or colonial master, and for at least 2 000 years it has developed largely on its own.

Though Senghor is far from being a pirate city, its lords turn a blind eye to pirate vessels as long as no piracy takes place within their claimed waters, and their own navy of several dozen ships enforces this edict with deadly force. Otherwise, any ships willing to pay a nominal duty on their cargo and reasonable docking fees (50 gp/day for a ship, or 5 gp/day for a boat) are free to use the port, with one glaring exception: Senghor steadfastly refuses to admit slave ships, and often refuses ships captained or even crewed by those of Bekyar ethnicity, because of that culture’s predilection for the flesh trade.